In the heat of August 1963, the Philips company introduced its new product, the audio cassette, an invention that marked the lives of generations for the next few decades and which celebrates its fiftieth birthday this month.
"It was a big surprise on the market," recalls today the eighty-seven-year-old Lou Otens, who is considered the creator of the audio cassette.
"Audio cassettes were so small compared to other similar devices that they became a real sensation in an instant," says Otens in an interview with Time magazine.
Audio-cassettes experienced a real boom in the second half of the twentieth century, mostly in the music industry, and numerous generations grew up with cassette players and rewinding their favorite tapes.
These cassettes consist of two symmetrical plastic surfaces, glued or screwed, with the same distance for the movable reels of switching the long tape. The frame of the cassette is standardized to a length of 10 cm, a width of 6,5 cm and a thickness of 2 centimeters.
Cassettes gained additional popularity with the development of recording and dubbing systems, because, which may sound incredible today, it became possible for individuals to create their own compilations, exchange them with others or give them to others with a symbolic selection of songs.
With the advent of CDs and later formats such as mp3, cassettes slowly fell into oblivion. Today, audio cassettes survive mostly in the world of collectors and those who look back with nostalgia. The British Daily Telegraph recently included the sound of rewinding an audio cassette on the list of sounds we miss today.
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